


Stung

by cherry_wood



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Character Study, Chloe-centric - Freeform, F/F, Gen, Kid Fic, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-25
Updated: 2017-10-25
Packaged: 2019-01-22 21:10:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12490912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherry_wood/pseuds/cherry_wood
Summary: Her father ensures that she wishes for nothing.Her father also ensures that she never gets what she really needs.-Before she was Queen Bee, before she was the most hated girl in school, before she was the angry teenage girl that craved attention like an addict craves meth, there was a lonely girl in a big hotel.





	Stung

**Author's Note:**

> So, I haven't watched season two or read any spoilers yet, but I love me some good old-fashioned cartoon rival! I find Chloe to be such a terrible character with a big potential for growth, I wanted to play with her almost immediately after I finished the first season! Everything here was written over the summer, so a lot of things have changed since then. Take everything you read here with a grain of salt.
> 
> Don't forget to kudo and/or comment! 
> 
> Enjoy <3

Her father ensures she wishes for nothing. 

The newest fashion, the newest toys, the newest cellphones, the newest everything are before her before they even hit the market. Only the best of the best for her, from her tutors to the nail polish on her little finger. La crème de la crème surrounds her, and from the moment she is born she is fawned and loved as though she were the fairest princess of the land. She is the crown jewel to her daddy’s empire, and he ensures that everyone knows it. 

Her father also ensures that she never gets what she really needs. 

She thinks she does, of course. When she is young, and small on the biggest hotel on Paris, she thinks she knows everything there is to know. She thinks she knows, because her daddy says she is clever and perfect and what is her life if not happy? She is the cleverest little girl and she knows happiness! 

After all, what is happiness, if not the newest tablet wrapped on expensive wrapping paper and delivered to her by one of the maids on behalf of her daddy when he can’t show up for Christmas dinner? What is happiness, if not for the gorgeous and exclusive Gabriel’s dress commissioned specially for her birthday, given to her the day after by her tutor, a note in her daddy’s familiar scrawl apologizing for missing the day? What is happiness, if not an empty and cold yet brilliantly elegant hotel room?

Whatever happiness is, she can buy it with her daddy’s credit card and have it delivered before the end of the day. 

She tells herself this every day, and yet there is still a strange weight on her chest when she is lead to her room after another day without seeing her father.

*

Her tutors pity her, quietly comment among themselves about how lonely and neglected poor little Chloe is. No matter how much she flaunts her new designer shoes, her new tiara, her new dress, the softness in their eyes does not disappear. She tells them all about her vacations and all about the trips her daddy has planned for them both. She tells them of how he will take her to Venice, to Milan, to London, to New York. Tells them how they will meet with the most important people in the world, about how they will stay in the most beautiful hotels and enjoy it while her poor tutors must stay and work through the summer. Yet, they still look at her like she is a kicked puppy, like she is helpless and tiny and not the princess of Paris herself. 

She starts kicking puppies to show them exactly how a kicked puppy looks like.

(Their faces tighten then and they refuse to look at her in the eyes. They call her a brat and a pain and insufferable behind her back but everything is better than the sadness that permeates their eyes when they think she is not looking.) 

The small satisfaction she gets out of it is somehow not enough to stop the sting on her heart when M. Garner informs her that her daddy will not be able to accompany her on their planned trip. 

She locks herself in her room and refuses to go anywhere. 

In the morning, a maid brings her a small box with a smaller note attached to it in her daddy’s writing. She destroys the note but wears the Cartier bracelet for her last lessons of the day. 

(Violin, because her mother was a talented musician and any proper lady should know how to play an instrument. Her daddy smiles when he sees her play and ruffles her hair after every performance he can attend.)

She ignores the look on Mme. Benoit’s face.

*

She doesn’t know she is lonely until she suddenly is not. 

She lives in the hotel, and she eats at the hotel and she takes her lessons on the hotel and she doesn’t need to leave the hotel if her daddy is not with her. She does not want to leave the hotel if her daddy is not with her. Whoever wants to see her, if they can’t go into the hotel to look for her then they surely are not important enough for her to care about.

(She is also afraid that her daddy will forget about her if she leaves, that if she stops claiming his attention then something else will absorb him and he would never notice the Chloe shaped hole in his life. Would there even be a hole in his life? Or would he just continue living and ignore it just like he did her when she finally, finally managed to perfect Paganini’s Caprice No. 4 in c minor?

Whatever the case, she will not leave the hotel.)

But then one day, while she runs away from M. Garner, she stumbles upon a lump with red hair on the floor. She falls on the floor with enough force to disorientate her, and one of her shoes flies off. It takes her a second to realize it, to realize that she is on the floor, and one of her precious designer shoes (giving to her by her daddy when he couldn’t come to dinner for the fourth night on a row) has fallen into the pool, and then she is furious.

Who dared leave something in the floor, something with which she could trip? Who was the idiotic moron who had such a grandiose idea? She would find the culprit and ensure her daddy fired them as cruelly as possible. 

But then the lump raises her head and suddenly all Chloe can see is the sea and the sky on a hot summer afternoon. All she can see is the jewels of her newest tiara, the center piece of Gabriel’s newest collection. The lump raises her head and stares at her and all Chloe can do is gape at her like a fish. 

Something in her brain clicks.

She shrieks as she breaks through the surface of the ocean that suddenly drowned her, and the lump jumps back. Shaking hands run through red stringy hair, and the brilliant eyes fill with tears. The lump frantically begs her to quiet down, to please stop screaming, please I don’t want them to find me, please, please, please. 

Chloe stops, not because she is keen on listening to the lump, but because she is surprised out of her outrage. She has talked to kids her own age before of course, has seen them and sat with them in silence as they wait for their parents to finish their business. She has listened to the kids that come into the hotel with their rich parents and their expensive shoes and their upturned noses. She has seen the kids that walk past the hotel, playing dreadful games like tag or hide-and-seek.

She has met kids her own age before, but no one quite as peculiar as the lump in front of her. 

She is intrigued. 

The lump is skittish and jumpy, with shaking hands and thin, thin limbs inside of a hideous sweater the color of spoiled fruit. Her hair is red, but not vibrant and luscious like the ones of the models on the fashion shows. Her face is pale, so pale, and her lips tremble like Chloe’s do when she prepares to throw a tantrum. But the lump doesn’t throw a tantrum, doesn’t scream back at Chloe, doesn’t do anything other than watch fretfully behind her back. 

She is ignoring her. 

Chloe takes a deep breath then, annoyed and fed up and upset because her day has just been one terrible thing after another, ready to tell the girl just who she bumped into when the girl suddenly spams and runs to hide behind one of the tables near the pool. 

She must have seen something, if her uncontrollable trembling is to be believed. 

“Please don’t” The lump begs, curling into herself. “Please, you promised M. Moreau”

Chloe scowls and opens her mouth but she doesn’t get to say a word before a voice cuts over her. 

That’s a first. 

“You know how it is mousy! If you didn’t want to get beaten, then you shouldn’t have showed up!”

The voice is nasal and high-pitched and so grating that she can’t help but clench her teeth against it. It wraps around her like the absence of her father and reaches the lump who whimpers in despair. 

Chloe turns around slowly and sure enough behind her stands one of those uppity rich kids, with their delicate golden hair and their poisonous tongues. The girl is small compared to the two brutes that chuckle behind her, but Chloe is no fool and she can tell a queen bee as easy as she can tell a Paganini from Batch, a Herrera from a De la Renta. 

She is a queen bee herself, after all. 

“Excuse me?” She asks, calm and poised, turning her nose up like Mme. Benoit when she gets a note wrong. Mildly annoyed but utterly uninterested. 

The girl grows red and her brutes stop in surprise. Her freckles are utterly unflattering, Chloe decides. 

“Don’t get involved” Ugly Freckles snarls at her, forgetting about the lump momentarily. She tries to intimidate her with the same upturned nose as before. “Get lost, girly”

She says it like it is an insult, like she is not wearing a white lace-trimmed dress herself. Chloe stares at her for a second, looks at her black and shiny but otherwise horrendous shoes, then stands up and flips her long golden hair so it cascades behind her back. The girl may have status and money if her outfit is anything to go by, but she lacks her class and Chloe is nothing if not willing to show that idiotic and hideous girl her place. 

“I am willing to forgive your misstep, as you apparently don’t know who I am. However, I will not forgive you for that hideous ensemble of yours. What, did you get dressed in the dark? Or has your family fallen in hard times and you had to make do with your Grand-Mère’s clothes? I can’t believe no one has done you the courtesy to tell you just how ridiculous you look! An eggshell dress with vomit yellow thighs? Disastrous. The shoes are obviously someone’s hand-me-down, probably from one of your better off neighbors, so I can’t really fault you for how used and wasted they look.” 

Ugly Freckles is fuming now, her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. Her brutes remain silence, obviously recognizing a superior queen when they see one. 

Good, Chloe thinks.

“Just who do you think you are?” The girl tries to sound menacing, venom coating her words, but her voice cracks and Chloe smiles. A for effort, disgusting little girl. 

“Chloe Bourgeois, princess of this hotel, fashion icon, beloved and superior to all. You may know my father, owner of this hotel and future Mayor of this city. You know, the very man that could ensure your family’s ruin with a call.” She sneers at her. “Now get lost, you are wasting my oxygen.”

There is a moment in which the girl hesitates, a moment in which Chloe wonders if she will have to bring out the big guns and comment on the girl’s very obvious, very ridiculous, humongous crush on the brute to her left. If she will have to tear apart the girl’s inferiority complex, attack her desire to fit in. But then the girl turns around and leaves, no doubt attempting to hide her tears. Her brutes remain for a moment, staring at her and gaping like the moronic brainless idiots they are before she shoos them away. 

She almost forgets about the lump, still riding high on her victory over the hideous girl, when she feels a small hand land over her shoulder. She turns and the ocean calls her, flooding her and drowning her before she regains control over herself. The lump’s eyes are filled with something Chloe has never seen before and that she does not understand. 

For some reason, it warms a spot inside of her that stung with every beat of her heart.

*

The lump’s name is Sabrina, and she is the daughter of a police officer. Her mother stays at home, and she is their only child. Her Grand-Mere lives a block away from her home and the only pet Sabrina’s ever had was a goldfish called Renee who died two months before school started. Her father drops her off at school every day before he goes in to work, and her mother picks her up. She goes to public school. 

She hates it. 

“It’s not all bad” She tells her as they sit on her bed, enjoying the cake M. Garner brought Chloe for lunch. She is not allowed to eat on her room, much less on her bed, but her daddy could not make it to lunch and M. Garner had made her promise not to tell before giving her the cake. 

There is no one she could possibly tell, so Chloe just rolls her eyes and ignores the sting on her chest, promising not to tell. 

In front of her, Sabrina avoids her eyes and somehow Chloe knows she is lying, even if she doesn’t understand why 

“There are some kids on my class who are very nice. My teacher is very nice. This whole field trip was his idea”

Chloe licks chocolate off her fingers before bothering to look at the squirrely girl across from her. 

“But what about your friends? Do you have any friends?”

Sabrina stiffens and her fork clatters against her plate. 

“I…well…I…” She swallows “I-I started the year after everyone else. T-t-they all already had their friends but it’s not their fault! They are all very nice and I-I well…I…”

Chloe feels pity for the girl, ocean eyes brimming with tears and face red with shame. Her freckles, she decides, are rather flattering. 

“That girl” She starts, putting Sabrina out of her misery, swirling a piece of cake around her plate. “Did not seem very nice.”

Sabrina’s lips thin. 

“Alix doesn’t like me.” 

“Why?”

“Because my dad arrested her brother when he was caught with drugs.”

It is said with such an insipid tone, with such an empty expression and a with such a disinterest that Chloe chokes on her cake. The Sabrina in front of her is not the skittish and nervous girl she just met, but an indifferent and almost cynical girl. The switch is so sudden, from one blink to the other, that there is no possible way Chloe could have prepared for it. Chloe stares at her but control herself enough not to gape. 

Just who exactly was Sabrina Raincomprix? 

One minute trying to hide on her hideous sweater, shaking hands clutching the fork with too much strength, the next holding her gaze with her back straight and her shoulders pulled back. Her eyes were soft like her mattress, and yet there was a steel as she stared back at her that spoke of a backbone stronger than most of Chloe’s acquaintances. Sabrina’s chin is tilted up, her expression defiant, daring Chloe to comment something rude or hurtful. 

Chloe wonders where this Sabrina was when ‘Alix’ hunted her down. 

She wonders if she can keep this Sabrina, too. 

“Well,” She says, bringing more cake to her lips and licking the fork clean. “I knew her family was full of addicts. Serves her right.”

Sabrina’s smile is like the blooming flowers her daddy keeps on her office, and her laughter is like the sweet chords of her violin. 

“How could you have known?”

“Oh, I smelt it on her. Rancid, putrid smell I tell you. Almost as bad as that horrendous outfit of hers.”

Sabrina giggles, and Chloe smiles, watches how the color spreads with a different kind of warmth across her cheeks and down her face. There is a lot of potential hiding under the anxiety and the nervousness, secrets hiding under a clear summer sky and framed by thick brown eyelashes. Sabrina hides steel under silk, strength under lumpy and hideous sweaters. 

She steals Sabrina’s strawberry and laughs at her indignant squawk. She lets Sabrina steal the last chocolate chip on her plate on retaliation, the drags Sabrina back up to the pool to show her just how much better life is when you are at the top. 

Whoever Sabrina Raincomprix is, she has captured Chloe’s attention and by God, she would figure her out. 

*

Her daddy doesn’t have time to tell her that he loves her, but he has time to investigate the only friendship Chloe manages to have. He sends her family a box of the most expensive chocolates he can get his hands on and a short note thanking them for taking care of his daughter. 

Chloe doesn’t know how he finds out, but she doesn’t particularly care. At least it shows he cares. 

Sabrina can’t stop stuttering after it, talking about how her dad was floored and how her mom was so grateful. She enjoyed the chocolates so Chloe buys her three more boxes and forces her to take them home. 

“From a friend to a friend.” She wraps a ribbon around the boxes and adds a tiny note with her name on it written with flourish. “Don’t bother on thanking me.”

Sabrina is blushing and stammering by the time she is done.

“But I have nothing to give you Chloe!”

“Then you will just have to be my servant forever.”

“What but---Chloe!” Sabrina swats at her and Chloe laughs, loudly and uglier than she would have ever done in public.

*

Sabrina does give her something, for all that it is worth

She gives her company, a small ocean to wade through when her world is overwhelming. She gives her smiles that shine like the sun, that carry no other intention than to share her joy. She gives her hugs that wrap around her like sunlight on a cold winter day, that warm her heart and her soul. She gives her someone to talk to, someone who will listen to her even if there are more important things to do. She gives her laughter, one that makes her belly ache and her heart burst. 

Sabrina gives her friendship, no strings attached, not one condition for her affection. 

And for Chloe, whose world is full of secrets and alliances that break as soon as they are formed, that means so much more than whatever expensive gifts she could give her. 

*

Her daddy is a very important man, and very important men have to show other men just how important they are. 

So, her daddy throws the most lavishing parties, where only the most powerful and rich people are invited. He hires the best cooks, uses the best silverware, hires the most sought out artists and pays the most exclusive decorators. The Bourgeois balls are a thing of legends, and something that has been happening ever since her great-great-great-great grandfather came into power. Before she was born, the balls used to happen at least four times a year, one for every occasion her father considered relevant. One for his birthday, one for her mother’s birthday, one for the day they met and one for the day they married. 

She’s heard they were incredible romantic. 

She wouldn’t know. She never saw them happen. 

(She doubts that she’ll ever see it happen.)

After she is born and after her mother is gone, her daddy throws a ball twice each year. Never on her birthday, of course, never when her mom’s departure weighted on her father the most. But there are two balls, one for the winter and one for the summer, and Chloe is always dressed and styled to be the prettiest princess in the ball.  
They curl her hair and her eyelashes, clothe her on gold and diamonds, cover her feet with slippers that are worth more than a newborn child. They place her strategically on the center of the room, where she can hold court but be controlled should she get out of hand. She smiles and she laughs and she twirls with the grace of a fairy, and smiles the widest when her daddy places a tiara on her head. 

Is one of the few times she sees him during the night. 

Their guests are invited to bring their kids with them, but few of them do. She knows it is not because they are “indisposed” even though they claim so, knows that many of them don’t bring them for fear of the injury they may cause. Rebellious and capricious she may be, but she is none where near as insufferable as many of the children on her world. At the very least, she knows to keep her tantrums for after the party, to save the tears and the whimpering for until she is alone and not making a spectacle of herself in public. 

The problem is not the children who don’t come; it is the ones that do that cause her more headaches than the imaginable. 

Charlotte Leroy is one of such headaches. 

The daughter of one of the most influential software moguls Jean Leroy, the daughter of the very beautiful Italian actress Lucilla Leroy, the very probable daughter of Satan himself, Charlotte Leroy had been invited to every single one of her daddy’s balls ever since she was six. It is a horribly tragic thing, because Charlotte lacks in personality what she has in connections. An enfant terrible with a penchant for mink and cruel remarks, with zero sense of fashion and zero sensibility. 

She hated her as much as someone like her could hate someone else. 

Yet, she had the connections her daddy needed if he wanted to be Mayor, and the power to use them. 

So she smiled, tightlipped yet angelical, when the girl approached her followed closely by her oldest cousin. 

“Charlotte my dear, it is a pleasure to see you again!” Her words tasted like poison on her tongue as she kissed her on both cheeks “I haven’t seen you since last winter!”

And I hoped I didn’t have to see you until the next one, she adds quietly on her head. 

Charlotte flipped her long strawberry locks, a disgusted sneer already pulling at her lips. 

“Chloe, my dearest, you know how it is, the life of a star. My mother had to film in Venice for most of the Summer, and I couldn’t possibly part from her.” Her tone is sugary sweet but her smile is sharp as a knife, pointing straight to her heart. “I bet you wouldn’t know how that feels.” 

“Don’t be mean, Charlotte.” Black spots swirl around Chloe’s visions, but she refuses to turn around. She doesn’t need to, anyways. 

Ronald Fitzgerald, future heir to the largest communications company on Britain and obnoxious loud-mouthed bother, grabs her by her waist with his sweaty hands. He leans and Chloe can feel his sharp chin stabbing her shoulder, Ambre Topkaki perfume putrid and crawling up her nose. 

She can see him smiling, bright pink lips stretched on a freckled face flickering on her peripheral vision.

“Surely you must understand; her parents need to work hard to remain barely worthy of our time” 

“Oh, Ronald. I did not know you planned on being here! Had I known I you would lower yourself in such a manner I would not have demanded my Papa to buy me a new set of Mary Jane’s to survive the night.” 

Charlotte is smiling too, sharp green eyes hardened like diamonds, chin tilted down in fake deference. She will never be as good an actress as her mother, Chloe thought spitefully. 

Yet, somebody would still hire her and make her popularity blow up like a dying star. Just like Chloe was already commissioned for different fashion agencies, just like Ronald was already and active participant on the RCSU, just like how those horrible rude Gyeong twins who stayed on the hotel over the summer were already part of a girl band. Just like they (and any child of their status worth remembering) had already been set to shine, Charlotte would have her big break and become as big a star as her mother was. 

It was the family business, and the family business was inescapable. 

Charlotte doesn’t come closer, doesn’t lean in to kiss his cheeks like she had done with Chloe, but she giggles airily and high pitched into her hand, like a besotted schoolgirl.

“I thought you had taken to hide away until your acne faded away.”

Ronald barks a laugh, a sound low and born from the bottom of his throat. His chest rumbles with it, scrawny and bony and still, Chloe can’t help but feel like she is being caught on the middle of an  
avalanche, danger rushing closer and closer with each of the vibrations she can feel against her back. 

“Oh no darling, Father has ensured a good dermatologist saw to my face. He did suggest your mother’s plastic surgeon, but I thought it would be excessive to allow a back-alley and sloppy bastard anywhere near my face”

There are three more voices joining in, distinctly masculine in their laughter. Chloe stiffens and breaths deeply, feels Ronald’s hands travelling lower before she determinedly tries to step away. 

His grip tightens, and then they are surrounded, Ronald’s idiotic followers closing in on all sides. Charlotte jumps, teeth bared but nose raised in the air, and the eldest of the McLain brothers throws a shoulder around her. Chloe feels little sympathy for her, and even less sympathy as the runt of the pack gets a mouthful of hair when Charlotte snottily fakes throwing her locks back to dislodge McLain’s arm. 

She fails. 

“Besides,” Ronald continues, nails biting into Chloe’s waist. “I could not pass the opportunity to see the loveliest Miss Bourgeoise once more.” 

The middle of the McLain brothers stares at her critically, stares at her chest and then at Charlotte’s. Charlotte stares straight ahead, eyes wet but unflinching even when his stare stays on her for a lot longer.

“She is prettier yeah. But she is too small for me” 

Chloe wants to curl in on herself, hide away from those beady blue eyes, but she refuses to let the son of one of America’s higher profile politicians intimidate her into flinching. 

He is new money. New money is nothing compared to her pedigree and her worth. She could put him in his place if she wanted to.

Across the room, her father laughs as Ronald’s father makes some insipid joke. Charlotte’s mother and father stand beside him, smiling politely but widely enough that Chloe can see the fakeness wrapped around their lips. There are other people around them, Mr.McLain and his wife, M. Gyeong and another blond man who Chloe has seen but has never been introduced to.

Her father’s eyes glint, both a warning and a reassurance. He is expanding, growing his chain farther than France and venturing into England and America. He needs these connections. She can’t mess this up for him. 

Her chest stings, burns in the place she imagines her heart is at, but Chloe grits her teeth and smiles. 

“Of course! I am prettier than any other girl on this Earth!” 

*

The sting on her chest disappears when Sabrina is around, or at least numbs enough for her to forget about it. 

Sabrina is shy in the beginning, quiet when not coaxed into talking, always wary of not overstaying her welcome. But Chloe’s life is full of pretty things and empty rooms and long winded pointless lectures and lessons, so she welcomes Sabrina into her life with open arms. Sabrina is an interesting distraction, a mass of contradictions and a ball of mysteries that Chloe can’t begin to make head or tails of. 

She is shy and she doesn’t feel comfortable on the hotel, so Chloe has M. Garner fetch her from the lobby directly to her room, where they can look out the balcony and Sabrina can pretend she is not sitting on the most expensive hotel in Paris, next to the richest girl in Paris. It makes her feel better and Chloe finds the hotel dull anyways so she doesn’t make it a point of contention. 

M. Garner ensures that none of her tutors bother her while she is with Sabrina, and brings them dessert when he knows her father won’t be at dinner. Sabrina can’t seem to wrap her mind around the fact that her butler seems to have so much sway on her life, but then again Sabrina can’t wrap her head around the fact that Chloe has a personal butler. 

They talk mostly, Chloe showing off whatever expensive trinket her daddy bought her, Sabrina properly fawning over it and not asking too many questions. Chloe doesn’t want nor need one more person on her life to wonder about why her father is never around. She doesn’t need anyone to look at her with pity when there is nothing about her to be pitiable. 

In exchange, Sabrina regals her with stories of her home and family, of the simple life she lives without luxury and empty rooms. She never mentions her school or her classmates, but her home life is so different and strange that Chloe can’t find it in herself to care. Whatever, it’s not like she wants to know what plebian school must be like. It is thanks to this stories that Sabrina loosens up, that she smiles more and laughs and shines like the crown jewel.

So Chloe greedily listens to her, listens and watches Sabrina come alive, listens and remembers this moments that she will never live on her own.

“You should have seen it! It was this big, ugly, black clump and the fire kept growing and dad kept trying to put it out but he couldn’t and mom kept screaming and Grand-Mere kept cheering on” She moves her hands, trying to describe the scene and Chloe watches her face, watches the sun reflect on her red hair and her eyes glint like shiny new jewelry. “…and that was why we never let dad cook anymore.”

Chloe misses a part of the story, but doesn’t bother trying to ask to hear for it again. Her daddy would never cook for her, or for her mother even if she hadn’t left. He would pay for the best chef in France to cook for them, to make a lavishing meal that even the gods she is learning from in her History lessons would envy. It makes no sense to wonder or dwell on impossibilities.  
Instead, she reaches for Sabrina’s bangs, pulls them back and runs her fingers through the rest of her hair. Sabrina squeaks in surprise, but Chloe doesn’t stop her exploration rather wondering how is it that Sabrina’s hair can look so thin and yet be so soft. She claps the hair near Sabrina’s scalps and pulls just slightly, surprised at how strong it is. 

“Chloe, what are you doing?” Sabrina’s face is red, as red as her hair, and Chloe wonders if she perhaps pulled too hard. Sabrina is breathless and so is she, warmth spreading all over her body. The ocean calls her and the sting on her chest disappears. “Chloe?”

She doesn’t let go of Sabrina’s hair. 

Her soft, soft, wonderful hair. 

“I think we should do something about your hair. It’s dreadful” 

She pulls Sabrina into her room, calls her stylist, arranges for an appointment. She takes an extra bottle of her shampoo and instructs her on how she should wash it from now on, M. Garner sent to retrieve the supplies Sabrina will take home for her new hair treatment. 

If it gives her an excuse to run her hands through Sabrina’s soft locks without any shame, then nobody needs to know. 

*

Her mother releases a new spring collection, and his father spends the weekend fending off the reporters and the agencies hounding the hotel doors and asking loud questions that make the glass doors vibrate with their volume. 

M. Garnier keeps her in her room, convinces her tutors to continue their lessons in there and the chef to bake her the red velvet cake with strawberries that Chloe has favored lately. Nobody asks questions, nobody so much as looks at her during this time period, and the swirly and complex designs on her dessert and her lavish dinners lose their shine as the hours pass by. 

Charlotte texts her, a quiet boasting that Mme. Leroy will work on the promotional TV Spots for her mother’s new line. Ronald text too, to congratulate her on her mother’s success, but she doesn’t answer him or the Gyeong twins when they call her sometime on the late Saturday.

Charlotte’s texts swirl on her head even as a new plate is placed before her. 

‘I sure do hope you know my momma will work with yours. She has visited set three times already in the last three days!’ She’d written, a long stream of text flashing across her newest cellphone. ‘What a wonderfully dedicated and passionate woman ;)’

Mme. Benoit confiscates her cellphone then, forces her to repeat Ashokan Farewell over and over again until her fingers bleed with the effort of holding the violin in position. She says it’s punishment and she is strict and harsher than she has been ever before, stopping her and making her start from the beginning until Chloe can’t do anything but remember which chords to play next.

Chloe is not stupid, and she doesn’t miss the glance she shares with M. Garnier when he brings her dinner. Chloe is not stupid, and much less is she grateful even as her butler carries tray after tray to her small table, promising that the paparazzi had been taken care of by the guards outside. That she would be safe, so long as she stayed inside her own room.

She stares at the deep red of the inside of her cake and feels her eyes stinging until acid rolls down her face. 

M. Garnier sends everyone out of the room then, her maid and her tutor and even her bodyguard, and holds her down as something breaks and shatters against the carpeted floors of her room. He holds her down even when a swan song plays over and over again on her head, a sad little and lonely thing that drives her nearly insane with the longing on his voice. 

He holds her and the acid burns down her cheeks, even as he cleans them away as best as he can with his gloves. 

“M. Garnier—” Someone says, broken and fragile, and it takes her a second to realize that it is her, that that is her voice now. “M. Garnier—”

“Jean” He says. He tries to smile, a quiet sorrowful curve to his lips. “Call me Jean, little bee.”

And this small token of care, this small kindness in a world that is too cruel for little princess girls like her, makes acid rain harder than either her or M. Garnie— Jean can hope to stop. She is sad, and forgotten and abandoned and no one has called her little bee in so long, she can’t help the quiet sobs that wretch from the vault of her chest. 

She cries and she want her mother back. She cries and she wants her father back. She cries and wants them to be her parents again, not two strangers too involved in their own personal ambitions to notice their daughter. She cries and wants them to be together again, wants them to remember a time when they were happy and in love. A time when being together had been enough.

She cries, and she wishes she was enough.


End file.
